We have a form which is used for requesting leave. We were asked to put a cancel button on it so that the requester could cancel their request if it has not been approved yet. This would need to cancel any attached workflows. The approval workflow is a standard SharePoint approval workflow.

The workflow is based around a task assigned to an approver in the workflow.

This task would be created by Start Approval Process in the workflow.

Unfortunately SharePoint does not provide a good solution for deleting this.

You could write an event handler but that’s hard to manage.

You could show users how to manually cancel workflows but that’s too complicated for some users.

You could create some whacky workflows that manage themselves but that’s too messy.

Our solution:

In the form create a status field. This field will have the following possible values: pending, cancelled, approved, rejected.

When a user cancels the leave request by clicking cancel in the form, we will update the status of the form to be cancelled. There will still be a task assigned to the approver that needs to be cancelled.

change the behaviour of the task

to check when the status field in the form changes to anything but pending.

After spending 3 days trying to work out why columns wouldn’t appear after being promoted from InfoPath, we finally resolved it today. This form had been previously working but the client decided they wanted more fields promoted.

The bad news is that it kind of solved itself. All I did was go back to basics and republish the form. Although I was told that we had tried this many times I just did it again on my pc. Previously it had been published from another pc. The columns appeared in the content type created by this form.

I then had to manually add the columns to the list from existing columns in that content type.

There are many people online complaining about having this issue but I can’t find anyone who can suggest a good answer. My suggestion is to try and republish your form until it works.

Update 29-June-2011:

One way to go about "resolving" this problem is to delete the columns and then re-publish your InfoPath form.

Delete columns using PowerShell in SharePoint 2011. Get the PS script for deleting columns from this blog. After you run this script you can delete specific columns with the command: Delete-WorkflowColumn -webURL http://portal -listName "Documents" -columnName "Column Name"

This week we set up Kerberos for a client. There are plenty of articles and blogs on how to do it so instead of writing another one I’ll just focus on what I believe will save you hours if not days if you are doing it for the first time. Namely how to avoid some gotchas.

As the Technet article does, get SQL working with Kerberos first before doing anything else.

Don’t guess the SPN’s. You will end up with a mess. Keep a record of which SPN’s you set so you can reverse them. Keep them all in one script.

Know your setspn commands

setspn – a (add)

setspn – d (delete)

setspn – l (list)

If you can’t debug Kerberos you will struggle. You NEED these tools & don’t be afraid to use them. Wireshark, - http://www.wireshark.org/ldifde & setspn - Windows 2003 resource kit and some scripts I’ll mention in a sec.

Using Wireshark

The most common problems you can encounter with Kerberos are as follows:

1. Non-synchronized time on servers

Cause:

Kerberos depends on time and if time on servers is different, Kerberos authentication will fail.

How to find out:

Run WireShark utility, start a packet capture and set the packet filter to the „kerberos“ expression. You should see a packet with error code KRB_AP_ERR_SKEW.

Solution:

Synchronize time on all servers with AD server time.

2. Duplicate or missing SPNs

Cause:

If you have multiple service accounts of one class (i.e. HTTP, MSSQLSvc) registered for one IP address or SPN wasn’t registered at all, Kerberos authentication will fail.

How to find out:

Run WireShark utility, start a packet capture and set the packet filter to the „kerberos“ expression. You should see a packet with error code KDC_ERR_C_PRINCIPAL_UNKNOWN or KDC_ERR_PRINCIPAL_NOT_UNIQUE.

Solution:

On AD server use the ldifde.exe utility to find out the duplicate SPN.

1. Open the web application for which you enabled Kerberos and monitor the server’s security logs in event viewer for errors. Remember, if Kerberos doesn’t function properly the server falls back to NTLM.

2. Run the following SQL query on SQL server. You can see which services use Kerberos or NTLM authentication.

3. Add an RSS webpart onto site homepage and use a list on subsite as the RSS source URL. If the RSS webpart displays RSS feeds then Kerberos authentication is working. RSS feeds from subsites do not work in MOSS without Kerberos.

This feature site template associate new features and functionality to existing templates.

Two features involved in the process:

o "Staplee" feature: This feature contains the functionality that you want to add to an existing site template.

o "Stapler" feature: This feature contains the "FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation" XML tags which bind the Staplee feature to a particular site template. Basically, it’s a feature that says “for all Personal Sites provisioned henceforth, they shall have the staplee feature.”

This solution worked beautifully in a SharePoint website we did for a client.

Create a new customised Master page with the look and feel that will be applied to MySites.

I started with the top Site Collection Master page, taken from SharePoint Designer, then I have applied the new layout to this page. I saved this page under MySiteStaplee feature folder (default.master).

Change MySiteStaplee/feature.xml to the location of your default master file:

Note that if you copy the Master file using SharePoint designer it inserts some unwanted characters, the best solution is to copy the content (ctrl c) and paste (ctrl v) into the new Master file.

Step 3: Run installation and activation for MySiteStaplee and MySiteStapler features:

· Install and activate the MySiteStaplee feature by running Install.bat; it uses the installfeature and activatefeature switches with stsadm to do so. When you activate it, do so to the web application that hosts MySites.

· Add the two assemblies that were created (the feature activation assembly and the custom ASP.NET web part assembly) to the Global Assembly Cache.

· Add the following SafeControl entry to the web.config for the web application that hosts My Sites:

MOSS does not allow you to set a default custom theme to your sites upon creation. The most painful example is in mysites. There are articles that give you the full detail on how to get around this but here is the quick and easy way thanks to our good friend Scot Hillier and his SharePoint 2007 Features on Codeplex.

1. Its Expensive

A SharePoint implementation doesn't have to be expensive. The most commonly used features such as:

Document Management

Approval Workflow

Announcements

Calendars

Office Integration

These all come standard with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).
WSS comes free with Windows Server 2003 and 2008. You don't even have to
purchase a SQL server licence.

2. It's not user friendly

Because SharePoint is easy to get up and running and is relatively inexpensive, many organisations install it and provide no training or instruction to their staff.
Like any highly functional software, SharePoint can introduce a lot of new concepts and so there are certain steps that should be taken by every organisation implementing SharePoint:
Assign a SharePoint champion(s).
Someone who has a good understanding of SharePoint from a users perspective and can help with day to day issues.
Someone to help manage change in an organisation, often with resistance from users.
With proper planning many of the common usability issues users experience when they first encounter sharepoint can
be greatly reduced or even removed. E.G Hiding features that are unnecasary or by creating shortcuts to the most commonly used features.

3. It doesn't look good always looks like SharePoint.

When it comes to the look and feel of SharePoint there are really 2 different SharePoints.
There is the Web Content Managment Side (WCM) and the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) side.
The good news is that the WCM side can be made to look however you choose.
Some of the best examples can be found here - http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/topwebsites.aspx
The ECM side which is more commonly used for intranets is easy to brand, harder to customise but can still be done so with a bit of effort.
Examples of what can be done can be seen on sites such as sharepointpackages.com

4. It's only a document management system

Although the fantastic Document Management functionality is what initially attracts most organisations to SharePoint,
Document Management is only skimming the surface of SharePoint's capabilities.
Some of the out of the box features are
News/ Announcements
Shared Calendars
Personal Sites
Forums
Wikis
Online forms
Surveys
and much more

5. It can be installed and configured by your IT dept even if they have no
SharePoint experience.

SharePoint installations can be done by anyone with IT experience but there are likley to be many best practices that will get overlooked.
Examples are incorrect permissions, sub optimal performance configuration, planning for future growth and correct back up procedures.

While working on a client's MOSS 2007 Publishing site, we ran into an issue where we simply couldn't create any CMS pages. After clicking Site Actions -> Create Page, the page would act like it was posting back and, after a several minutes, would either time out, or prompt me for my credentials 3 or 4 times in a row only to finally display a "You are not authorized to view this page" error. The same happened when attempting to create a page from clicking "New" in the Pages library, clicking "Create" on the View All Site Content page then clicking Publishing Page, or clicking New on the Mangage Content and Structure page while in the Pages library.

Probably cause:

This all started happening after I went into Site Settings -> Page Layouts and Site Templates (under the Look and Feel section) and modified which Page Layouts were available for the user to select when creating a new CMS page. Figuring the issue lied in this change of settings, I tried to go back into the Page Layouts and Site Templates settings page again, only to discover it was acting the same way as the Create Page function.

Resolution:

Having no error information to go against and nothing useful coming from the bumped up logs (except an unknown lockfile error which we can't even be sure was linked to our issue), we took a shot in the dark that our issue was permissions related. The user we used to change the Page Layouts and Site Templates settings was a Farm Administrator, Site Collection Administrator, and had Full Control on the particular site we were on, not to mention the fact that we were able to change the Page Layouts and Site Templates settings with this user in the first place. However, we logged in with the System Account and voila!!, we were able to create a CMS page AND access the Page Layouts and Site Templates page.

Webcoda, SharePoint Consultants & Web Development

We can't tell you their names or show their faces on TV but if you need a SharePoint job done right, call them on +61 2 9370 3602 or email us at info@sharepointsydney.com.au

Persecuted by the Government and shunned by society they developed their SharePoint skills in back streets and labor camps where other programmers wouldn't dare to tread.

During a trek through the Himalayas they stumpled upon the fabled Mossy Yak who shared his SharePoint knowledge of how to attain Nirvana through a series of Workflows and Event Handlers. Their mission is to spread this knowledge through-out the world to bring peace, harmony and document version control to all .